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Projects on Managing Medical Personnel and Resources

Current Projects

Assessing PROFIS and Potential Alternatives

The Army Medical Department’s Professional Filler System (PROFIS), developed in 2005, is an internal management system used to assign clinical personnel to units deploying for combat missions. PROFIS also allows medical providers to practice in a Medical Treatment Facility (MTF) when not deployed. RAND is assessing the potential need for modifications or improvements to the PROFIS.

Increasing the Supply of Military Nurses

At a time when nurses are critically needed to care for the wounded, the DoD faces a shortage of nurses in uniform. RAND is evaluating the feasibility and merits of a proposal to create incentives for former military nurses to take faculty positions in nursing schools for the purpose of encouraging more nurse graduates to consider military service.

Chemical, Biological, and Radiological (CBR) Agent Effects on Medical Support for Amphibious Operations

RAND is analyzing current Navy procedures for extracting ashore forces and conducting medical operations afloat under CBR attacks, seeking to understand how these capabilities would be affected during CBR attacks, and proposing new procedures to improve medical support for amphibious forces.

Completed Research

Joint Medical Education and Training

Lessons learned on today’s battlefields show that medical personnel and organizations from all U.S. services are blended as required with those of other services, nations, and agencies to provide battlefield medical care. Thus, joint education and training is needed to provide the common groundwork and understanding that allows U.S. service medical personnel to work together effectively in such stressful environments and to be fully trained for roles outside the battlefield, including duties related to homeland defense, civil support, and medical civil-military operations. RAND assisted the U.S. Army Medical Education and Training Center in developing its joint and service-specific training and curricula and establishing the basis for effective and efficient delivery of the training over time. This study produced several reports that can be found on the RAND website.

Measuring Workload Performance at Military Treatment Facilities

The Department of Defense (DoD) sought to assesses the performance of its military treatment facilities (MTFs) in cost-effectively managing health care under DoD's TRICARE benefit. RAND surveyed methods of performance assessment in the nonmilitary health-care sector. It then analyzed the use of changes over time in average MTF utilization and costs as performance measures, focusing on the roles played by MTF size and catastrophic cases.

Maintaining Military Medical Skills During Peacetime

Most military medical personnel are stationed at military treatment facilities where they treat beneficiaries of TRICARE, the military health care program. However, the medical skills required during deployment are likely to differ significantly. RAND examined alternative arrangements for maintaining medical skills for deployment and proposed a model that stations personnel in such nonmilitary settings as emergency rooms or trauma centers.

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